During the 2024 presidential election, President Donald Trump broke precedents when he achieved 42 percent of the Latino vote, a record for a Republican candidate. Yet according to former Trump supporter and ex-GOP lawmaker Joe Walsh, the result of Trump’s immigration policies is that these same voters are now “fleeing” the party.
“It's clearly an issue that is profoundly moving Latino and Hispanic voters in this country — Latino and Hispanic voters who, I want to remind everybody, I want to remind every Democrat listening to me, voted for Trump in enormous numbers in 2024,” Walsh said on his Wednesday Substack episode. “Don't forget that, Democrats. We — I'm a Democrat — we've got our own problems when it comes to Hispanic and Latino voters.”
He added, “They've turned on Trump now, within a year, on a dime. They're fleeing Trump and the Republican Party.” Yet he added that this does not mean Democrats will automatically benefit from their disillusionment with the MAGA-fied GOP. The same polls which show Hispanic voters are upset with Trump also reveal that majorities want to enforce border security. All it means, according to Walsh, is that these same voters recognize the Republican Party is not a welcoming home for them.
“Trump has taken it to such a dark, ugly, cruel, hateful, un-American, lawless, and fascist place, Latino and Hispanic voters — those who voted for Trump, who voted Republican in 2024 — they're bailing,” Walsh said.
Walsh is not the only pundit to note that Trump’s immigration policies are turning off voters, Hispanic and non-Hispanic alike. A February survey of 2,300 people taken by The Washington Post found that 39 percent of respondents supported Trump while 60 percent opposed him. Among those who disapproved, immigration was most commonly cited as the policy they objected to. Respondents blasted Trump for “detaining and deporting immigrants with no criminal background,” allowing “ICE all the power they have,” encouraging “Gestapo style of deporting illegal immigrants... even killing at least two U.S. citizens” and permitting “everything with ICE, deporting immigrants, etc.”
Speaking to Politico earlier in March, Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist, told Politico that the GOP had a brilliant way to address the situation, then threw it all away.
“With the border secure and Latinos responding to ICE raids and government overreach, the districts that Republicans thought were their future a year ago are likely to be their undoing. Hard to find another situation in the past 50 years where a political party has squandered a generational opportunity like this," he said.
Daniel Guerrero, CEO of the South Texas Builders Association, told Politico in the same interview that anti-Trump sentiment is rampant in his industry due to the federal raids and attacks on random construction sites.
“The sentiment is pretty clear across the table, that nobody really expected this magnitude of enforcement,” Guerrero explained, admitting that he himself voted for Trump in 2024.
